NUCLEAR SAFETY IN DENIAL... We risk destruction as a modern society:
Russian television reported on Wednesday: "Our [Russian] security services are warning the United States that what happened on Tuesday is just the beginning, and that the next target of the terrorists will be an American nuclear facility." [See www.nci.org.] Meanwhile, eight years ago, in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, the terrorists themselves wrote to the New York Times to warn that nuclear attack would follow.
That letter, judged authentic by federal authorities, talked of "150 suicide soldiers" who would hit "nuclear targets."
... A terrorist strike at any such plant could not bring about a nuclear explosion--but there are a number of scenarios that would spread deadly radiation clouds across, in the NRC's famous phrase, an area the size of Pennsylvania. On top of the tens of thousands of eventual radiation-driven deaths, there is the mass panic such an attack might cause. And if we can clean up and rebuild after the World Trade Center bombing, a radiological attack would force us to write off huge swathes of land as 'national sacrifice areas'.
... In France, the defense minister has stationed troops around nuclear power plants... But in America, not much is being done.
thenation.com.
Also, see my earlier posts on this topic:
<3932> and <3820> on the "AMERICA UNDER SIEGE" thread.
So why is the Bush/Cheney energy plan proposing to extend the Price Anderson taxpayer-funded insurance guarantees for the nuclear power industry, without doing anything to resolve the massive security risks?
A more foolish and short-sighted policy could not be imagined. |
